IRC is a little trickier and you kinda have to know about the community before using it. Torrents are the most reliable and easily accessable since free Direct Downloads for anything tend to die after a while since the strain is completely on one or a handful of servers.

I get 99% of my stuff off of bittorrent and only use IRC when I'm trying to get something that's hard to find. Then, when I'm lazy, I do use some random direct downloads.

There are other topics on this subject. So I'm gonna redirect you to those.